


Strangers in a Strange Land

by MotherInLore



Series: Slayers West [2]
Category: Always Coming Home - Ursula K. Le Guin, Slayers (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Crossover, Culture Shock, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-29
Updated: 2016-04-29
Packaged: 2018-06-05 04:28:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6689173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotherInLore/pseuds/MotherInLore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A prophesy has sent the gang into the Outer Lands again... and they need help.  Prequel to "A Man of Coyote's House."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strangers in a Strange Land

Amelia was homesick and she felt like a complete freak. It hadn't been like this the last time they went into the Outlands. That time, they'd had a clear beacon to follow. Not to mention Filia's guidance. Last time, the peoples they'd run across hadn't been all that different from the ones they'd left behind, if you allowed for the lack of magic. The same for the buildings. But they were easily twice as far from the old Border as they'd been before, and the town of Anitok might as well be a pocket dimension.

To start with, there were almost no buildings at all in this supposed “port town.” There were elaborately carved door lintels that led into holes in the hills, and there were awnings on poles in the flats at the mouth of the bay. Then there was the question of what the people under the awnings were doing: it didn't look like a market – was it a festival? There were drums beating somewhere... but no food cooking anywhere that they could smell, no dancing... And these people couldn't have looked more different. Brown skins in many different shades – this much, at least, the party from Seyruun was used to by now. Feather earrings, on the men and the women both. Elaborately braided and beaded beards and hair. Tattoos and body paint- Zel-san probably stood out less than any of the rest of them, truth to tell, or would if he changed his clothes. Because nobody else in Anitok, male or female, seemed to be wearing a shirt. Amelia didn't know where to look.

A problem that seemed, to some extent, to be shared by the townspeople, who did not seem to be particularly friendly to strangers. “Do you notice how many of them are staring?” Amelia whispered to the others, “or, not staring exactly, but sort of sidling by and looking out of the corners of their eyes and then away again?” 

Gourry -san wasn't in a position to notice anything, since he had his eyes screwed shut in a red face, whimpering “nakednaked,” over and over. Lina-san murmured, “Yeah...” Zelgadis just looked at them both, lips slightly tightened.

“Welcome to your world, huh, Zel?” Which was very perceptive, for Lina-san.

“Pretty much.”

Lina-san brightened up. “Actually, you might be the best one to do the talking here. Look – those guys over there have wigs made of wire, and those other ones are painted blue, and they've got... peg legs, it looks like, all set with metal and gemstones – wow, those look heavy. Maybe if you take off your shirt, and borrow some jewelry from Amelia...” Lina stood on tiptoe and reached for the clasp on Zel's cloak, as he tried to fend her off.

“Don't you- dare-”

“Aw, c'mon! We- need-”

“So you are here, fellow travelers!” The cheerful voice belonged to a young woman, blessedly clothed, in a light, dusty-green tunic to her knees and belted with a red-brown sash over dark-brown trousers. Her build was square and stocky, like the people under the awnings, but her face was rounder, her nose pointed down rather then up, and her hair was a mass of frizzy curls that made a border between her face and a broad straw hat, not oil-slick ropes of braids down her back. She led a red-brown mule, lightly laden with a blanket and a pack not much larger than the one she carried herself.

“Hi!” Lina-san gave over trying to strip Zel down and offered her hand to the newcomer, who hesitated a moment before meeting it with her own, tentatively, as if she were unfamiliar with the gesture. Lina-san introduced herself; “I'm the famous, beautiful, genius sorceress, Lina Inverse, and that's Gourry – it's all right, Gourry, you can look - and Amelia and Zelgadis. We're on a very important mission from Seyruun, which is a fabulous city that you've probably never heard of; no one else around here seems to have.”

The woman only blinked a little at this announcement, then bowed slightly to them all, one hand on her collarbone. “This is a good day you have made, Linainverz. I am Wehisho Sudrevidovmav, or that would be Swallow of the Serpentine House, in Talk. My home is Tachas Touchas, in the Na valley on the other side of the Inland Sea; most people here in the Range of Light know us as the Wine People, but our word for ourselves is 'Kesh.' My companion here is Fefinum, which means cedar.” She patted the mule.

“Glad to meetcha, Wehisho-san! Do you know where to go around here to get something to eat?”

***

It had begun with a warning from a ghost, and with a music box. “See, Amelia!” her father had boomed, drowning out the odd, flutelike tones coming from the little box, “When you hold it up to the window it starts going. Cover those little black mirror-things, and it stops. And supposedly, somewhere in the Outlands, there's a place where they can make really big ones – big enough to power a mechanical loom!”

“The City of Mind, it's called,” Amelia's Uncle Chris added. As Minister of Healthy Paranoia, he was often one of the first to hear about interesting new things. “Supposedly, this City holds all sorts of powerful secrets, dating back to before the War of the Monster's Fall. The first of the Inner Kingdoms to establish good relations with it is going to have a huge advantage. But no one will tell us anything about where it is. 'Somewhere to the West,' is about the best we get. And then on top of that, there's this prophesy.”

Her father nodded emphatically, arms crossed. “Young Greywords passed on a warning from a ghost he encountered -”

“Zel's back?”

Both men nodded, smiling indulgently and making her blush. _Keep your mind on your duties, Amelia._

“Yes, dear... And he passed on a warning from a ghost who said that Seyruun needed to find something called 'wudun' before it fell into the sea. Not at all clear whether it's us or this wudun thing that's supposed to fall, but the ghost mentioned the City of Mind, too.”

Uncle Chris took up the tale. “Of course, we weren't about to do anything on the word of just one ghost, so we passed the word 'wudun' on to our own oracles as a double-check, and every last one of them lit up like they'd eaten fireballs for breakfast and said we needed to head out _now.”_

“This is of vital importance to the Kingdom of Seyruun!” Her father trumpeted. “Amelia! You've demonstrated a gift for lucky coincidences, and finding the right place at the right time. You must use these powers for Justice! Show fortitude and leadership! I'm assigning you to this quest!”

“Besides,” Uncle Chris muttered, “It'll get her out of the way before the Duke of Yorgopolis tries to kidnap her again and marry her off to his wastrel of a son.” Neither Amelia nor her father paid any attention. Yorgopolis was just not a concern to anyone but the Ministry of Healthy Paranoia.

“Oh, Papa!” Amelia had taken a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “I will not fail you! I will bring the shining light of Justice to the farthest reaches of the world, and I will find this treasure!”

“Take Greywords with you, too,” Uncle Chris advised. “And Ms. Inverse and her boyfriend, and anyone else you think you may need, but it's going to be a stealthy mission, so don't go overboard.”

“I have faith in you, sweetie!” Her father swept her up in a hug, as if she were still a little girl and not nearly twenty. “Justice demands that you take this risk for your people!”

*** 

Well, so here they were in the Range of Light, on the Omorn peninsula, so far from home that Zelgadis-san calculated that not even a team of dragons could fly them back in less than a month's time. They'd actually invited Filia to come with them, and she had flatly refused. She'd had plenty of warnings to give them, though, as she piled things she thought they would need on the counter of her shop:

A small book full of woodcuts came first: In the cliffs and rocky places, they were to watch out for snakes that looked like this one. Or this one. Or these other ones in the swamps. In fact, it was better to avoid the swamps altogether if it was at all possible, even if you had a guide. If you had to go into the swamps for some reason, (two small jars of something and a scroll joined the book full of snakes on the shop counter), cast the most effective spells you could find to keep the bugs away because the ones that weren't poisonous outright carried diseases. Cast Di Clery immediately if one of these spiders – or those- or those, or that one- bit you. In fact, cast Di Clery any time you weren't sure _what_ had bitten you.

“At the time of the Kouma wars,” Filia went on, flitting among her shelves and pulling out a dusty, brittle-looking map, “both Lord Beastmaster and the Deep Sea Dolphin had redoubts somewhere out that way. Nobody seems to think they're still there, but nobody knows what threw them out. And that reminds me,” she spread the map out on top of everything else and pointed. “If you see this symbol anywhere, either on a map or even just painted on a rock or a tablet or something, get at least five miles away, preferably upwind, no matter how green and inviting and peaceful it looks. We think it's the sign of ancient battlegrounds, maybe, but we're sure that there's a slow poison in those places that makes your hair fall out and turns your body against itself.” Filia had folded the map up again with a crackle and grabbed a cup of tea to steady herself. Then she'd grabbed another thick book and added it to the pile. “You'll need this dictionary, too,” she announced. “Once you get beyond the Spine nobody speaks Golden or Aqua at all. The common trade language is called 'Talk,' and you'll need to adjust your translation spell, and for some reason, if it works for Talk it stops working for most other languages. So wait until you get past the Spine to adjust your spell. I guess that's about it,” she finished, abruptly cheerful and calm once more. “That will be thirty thousand, please.”

“Try three thousand.” Lina-san had suggested. “And then I won't cast a fireball and destroy half your merchandise.”

“Twenty-five thousand. Oh, and that reminds me. The country west of the Spine is very dry, and you'll be getting there in the hot season. Don't cast a fire spell if you can make Wind or Ice or Earth do instead, because if you start a wildfire the locals will have absolutely no mercy on you.”

 

***

Well, they'd gotten this far, and while Amelia wouldn't have called it easy, it had, by the standards of some of their previous adventures, been simple. No Mazoku manifested themselves. Nobody found themselves engaged to anyone by accident or mistaken for the opposite sex. There had been that little incident by the Freshwater Sea where someone had decided Gourry-san was the incarnation of the local grain god, but they'd gotten out without anybody being sacrificed. It was fine, really. Just for now, Amelia was prepared to relax for an evening and be sociable with their fellow traveler.

Wehisho-san did indeed know how to find food in Anitok, and a great deal of other useful information besides. “We should stay away from the flats,” she advised. “What's going on is, a lot of the harvest shipments are going out around the Inland Sea right now. The Agave People down south, the Amaranth People to the West... so, since the boats are going out anyway, the Deep Rock People gather in from the Ranges and bring their metals and stones, too. But they have religious matters to attend to, and they like to keep their _wakwade_ private. So those of us who just want to hitch a ride with the islanders try to hang back some until they're done.”

“So how many of those crazy-looking people down there are priests?” 

“Any of the ones with missing limbs do some kind of sacred work, why?”

“Just wondering...”

They hadn't come across any organized gangs of bandits in these hills, to Lina's disappointment. A network of priests would be the next best source of information for their quest, but not if they were angry about interrupted ceremonies.

_How hard can it be to find a city? Especially a famous one?_ But they had had no luck at all getting anyone to point them to the City of Mind so far. Zel-san had purchased maps: dozens of them, large-scale and small, enough to paper the walls of the audience chamber from floor to ceiling. They were astonishing in their detail and their consistency from one vendor to the next. A map of the world the size of a large blanket would have been a state secret back home, kept in the treasure vault. Here, there was one in almost every town. Whenever they'd asked where the maps had come from, the answer was always, “The exchange,” or “The City.” But there were dozens of 'exchanges' all in little towns, and no one would tell them where the City was. “Everywhere,” they would say, or else they would say, “No, don't go there! Bad place for humans! Poison!” Not one map had anything on it labeled “City of Mind.” 

Well, Wehisho-san seemed knowledgeable and inclined to be helpful. She led them all up to an especially large and elaborate doorway, decorated with, among other things, a hugely tall pole that Amelia itched to Levitate her way to the top of, if only to see why that dull metal disc at the pinnacle was affixed at such an odd angle. At the door, an elderly woman with white stripes painted on her cheeks and a hook hand chased with fantastical gold inlay work took two lampworked glass beads from Wehisho-san and muttered something, waving her hook vaguely back toward the hills.

Then they all trooped after Wehisho-san to another doorway, much lower down the hill, that had a rusty-looking stream flowing out of it. The mule bent down to drink, and its keeper set about removing the pack it carried and attaching a picket line. The task was accomplished with a speed that spoke of much practice. Wehisho gestured at the cave/doorway. “This is the washing place,” she announced. “And the etiquette here is that your arms must be, not only clean, but also bare to the shoulders, when you sit down to eat. Very sensible, really, when you think about what dirty work mining is.” She headed into the cave, and the others followed.

The pools in the cave weren't deep enough to bathe in- they were more like catch-basins for a steady drip of warm water that flowed in from... somewhere. But the water was warm, at least. And the lamps that burned were dim enough that Amelia could at least _pretend_ it didn't matter that there wasn't any kind of partition to separate a men's and women's side. Lina-san didn't try to pretend. She immediately ordered Zel and Gourry-san over to another basin a few yards away (“But it's cold,” Gourry objected), promised dire consequences if she caught a glimpse of any part of their heads but the backs before she said it was all right, and then, for good measure, kept her cloak on and did most of her washing tented underneath it.

Wehisho-san had no such compunction, and observed the performance quizzically. She stripped off her tunic right there in front of everyone and didn't even stop to see who was looking as she washed herself all over, even under her breasts, and then damped down her cloudy hair and twisted it back into a knot. A few strands started escaping almost immediately.

_How do I deal with this tactfully?_ Amelia wondered, blushing furiously. One one hand, it was clear that the rules about nudity were very different here. On the other hand, she really didn't think she would be able to concentrate on either her dinner or on interviewing their new companion if Wehisho-san came out into the sunlight looking like that. “Um... Lina-san? Do you want to borrow one of my camisoles?”

“Huh?” Lina's head popped out from her cloak collar. “Nah. I've got one I can use.” She vanished under her cloak again.

Wehisho-san either took the hint or had been going to do something anyway, because she unfolded a pretty, soft-looking scarf from somewhere and wrapped it around her top half, below the shoulders but covering her breasts and most of her midriff. “Everyone ready?” she inquired, mildly.

 

***

It wasn't until it was too late that it occurred to Amelia that maybe she should have said something to Wehisho-san ahead of time about Zelgadis. She caught the moment when they all emerged from the dim bathing cave and out in the sunlight, and Wehisho-san got a good look at the two young men without their shirts. Zel-san glittered a little, looking, in Amelia's opinion, more beautiful than any normal human ever could, but she knew he didn't see himself that way. Already, his face and spine were both tensing, waiting for Wehisho-san's reaction.

The muleteer's brown eyes widened, briefly, and her face took on a gravity that Amelia suspected of masking some other emotion. All she said, though, was, “I will indeed be glad to learn more about you all.” Then she took the lead again, to yet another cave.

This one proved to be the household of a cheerful old couple who were willing to feed them all, in exchange for another one of Wehisho-san's beads and a bottle of vinegar she pulled from her pack. Amelia shyly inserted herself into the conversation and explained about cooking extra because of how much Lina-san and Gourry-san ate, and the man, whose name seemed to be Hess, agreed, cheerfully. He was only mildly interested in Amelia's gold coins but accepted a topaz, which he looked at though a jeweler's loupe.

A few minutes later, he'd set up a picnic blanket under one of the trees next to the cave and invited them all to sit down. The loupe came out again when he spotted Zel-san, who Mister Hess seemed to think had undergone something like a tattoo process. “How'd you manage it?” he asked, squinting at Zel-san's shoulder while the chimera blushed. “It's quite an effect.”

“It was a curse, not something I did on purpose!”

“Huh. If I found you down in the mines though I'd think you were the Wealthy Stone Mother's child, for sure... Gives me an idea for the next tattoo I do for somebody though.” Mister Hess whipped out a scrap of paper from somewhere and began sketching. Zel-san sighed.

Wehisho-san, proving herself diplomatic, distracted Mister Hess, or rather, brought him back to his role of host. “I understand you traveled a great deal around these mountains when you were younger?”

“Yup. That's why the Missus and I like to feed travelers now. Keep in touch with what the world's up to. Can't always afford to do much corresponding through the exchange – not that I blame the Temple, exactly, with all those mouths to feed right now. There was a bad earthquake eight-ten years back - collapsed one of the big lodes - and a bunch more people than usual gave their blood and bone to the Stone Mother and got marked for sacred work.”

Mrs. Hess came out with several big clay pots, full of the local variant on the dish that Amelia had come to expect for dinner, surely as rice and fish at home: It involved one of several different kinds of boiled grain, one or more of several varieties of beans, and any number of different flavorings, from herbs to fruit to eye-watering peppers. The Anitok version was mild, with crumbles of sheep-milk cheese in among the dried apple and onion. The conversation turned general. Wehisho-san explained that, while she worked mostly with something called the Finder's Lodge, “several of her mothers” had been doctors - “that's pretty common for Serpentine; the Doctor's Lodge is under Serpentine the way the Hunter's Lodge is under Blue Clay” - and she herself had a fair bit of medical training - “mostly with horses and mules, in practice, and learning at the exchange in Wakwaha-na.” She was on her way home after spending a season with the Klatsaand people to the south somewhere, studying a technique they'd developed for treating muscle tremors and collecting samples of medicinal plants. Her smile turned a little sad. “None of my mothers understood why I wouldn't just talk to the Klatsaand people through the exchange and leave it at that. Even most of the other Finders think I'm crazy.”

It didn't sound crazy at all to Amelia, and she said so, which brought the attention back to them. “And where are you all from?” Mister Hess wanted to know. “I've only ever seen pale skin like that on the islanders and you lot didn't come by boat.”

“Seyruun is a long way to the east – across the ocean beyond the plains on the other side of the Spine.”

“The what?”

“That mountain range on the other side of the Omorn sea?”

“Oh, the Range of Heaven. Why don't you show us on a map?” 

Zel-san obligingly pulled out the smaller of the two world maps he'd bought and showed them. “We started here.”

Wehisho-san and Mister Hess both leaned in, then both sat back, looking solemn. The younger woman tapped two brown fingers on the red circle that marked the old Mazoku barrier. “If I were you,” she told them, “I would be very cautious about telling people that I came from inside the Cyst. People are superstitious, you know, even educated ones. All the stories _I_ ever heard about the Cyst assumed it was protecting the world from something malign, and a lot of people are worried about whether it broke because it wasn't needed any more or if something burst it and now the rest of the world will be infected.”

Towns and towns' worth of cagey, suspicious, local people suddenly clarified themselves in Amelia's memory. _I thought it was just a reaction to Lina-san._

“So what about you?” Lina-san asked. “Are you superstitious like that?”

Mister Hess shook his head, and Wehisho-san shrugged. “Maybe a little,” she said, “but I'm a Finder through and through. Give me a chance to see something I've never seen before and I'll risk a lot. I'm happy to keep talking with you as long as you like.”

“Perhaps you can help us, then,” Zelgadis-san said. “We're out here under the direction of a prophesy – do you have prophesies out here? We've passed some places that don't- oh. Good, then. Anyway, we were directed to seek a city in the Far West, find something there, and bring it back 'before it falls in the sea.” Whether it's the city that's going to fall, or the thing, we don't know.”

The four of them had decided ages ago that they weren't going to use the word “wudun” if they could avoid it, just in case it turned out to be something they had to steal instead of buying or rescuing. It seemed horribly unjust to Amelia, but she'd gone along with it so far. Once they actually found the actual City of Mind, instead of all these outposts, she'd renegotiate.

“Cities, eh?” Mister Hess stroked his chin. “Not any of those around here that I can think of. How about you, Wine Valley woman? Are there cities for humans on the other side of the Inland Sea?”

“Not now,” Wehisho-san shook her head decidedly. “The Condor People had Sai, and Loklotso, in the volcano country, but I'm pretty sure they all died out. Certainly nothing new has sprung up since then; all the older people between the Western Sea and the Range of Heaven still remember what happened when the Condor People got infected, and they're quick to jump on anyone who acts like their heads might be turning.”

“Infected? Was there a plague?” That actually might make a lot of sense, Amelia realized. The City of Mind was clearly the ruling power here, but if it had mostly been wiped out by a plague, a decade or two ago, then all the border territories might just sustain the parts of the old power structure that they found useful, including the 'exchanges,' whatever they were.

“A disease, anyway,” Wehisho-san confirmed. “ _Tavpoye,_ The Sickness of Man.”

“Which manifests how?” Zel-san asked, brows down in concentration.

“Oh, well, you know,” their new informant shrugged. “People start living outside the world. They start hoarding things and power instead of letting them flow, and they take slaves and have an army, and their women have too many children, and like that.”

Zel-san choked. “And that's a disease, is it?”

“Oh, yes. Rather like vedet, or more like schizophrenia, where you listen to your own head so much you can't hear anyone else. Only usually it's groups, not just individuals, that have trouble with _tavpoye._ ”

Amelia felt herself stuttering mentally. When she thought of somewhere like Ruginvald, she could sort of see what Wehisho-san meant, but... “B-but, how do you keep everybody safe, if they have an army and you don't?”

“That is one way it can spread,” Wehisho-san agreed. “ _Tavpoye_ is indeed very infectious. In the Valley we had to send a few people away, in the end, and we were really just at the edges of the trouble. Some of the volcano country is still recovering.”

“But...” Zel-san put a cautionary hand on her shoulder, and Amelia fell silent. A small voice inside herself, one she mostly tried to ignore nowadays, whispered, _he touched me. He touched me on my bare skin_... but that was a tangle for another day. Still.

“What about the City of Mind? Do you know where that is?” Lina-san asked.

“Everywhere.” The expected answer.

“But does it have a capitol? A – a center?”

“Not that I ever heard, but _Yaivkach_ isn't really in the world. I don't understand how it all works.”

Zel-san sat up straight. _“Yaivkach?”_

“Yes, that's 'City of Mind' in Kesh.”

“Our prophesy said, ' _Yaivkach_ holds the old secrets'...”

Wehisho-san considered this. “Well, the City of Mind remembers everything, and some of it is indeed very old, but I don't think any of it is secret. You can't even send a coded message through the exchanges. They send the key right along with the message and anybody can read it. The tricky part is learning how to ask, and that can indeed take a lifetime.”

Zel-san stood up abruptly. “Excuse us, please. I don't wish to be rude, but I think the four of us need to confer in private for a few moments.” They all four got up and moved to the next tree over.

“Okay!” Lina-san started. “We need to see if we can stick with that Wehisho, I think. She knows stuff. I'll bet she knows more about the City than she's telling.”

“She seems nice,” Gourry-san offered.

“I wonder, about that business of the City not being in the world,” Amelia admitted. “Do you think maybe she meant it literally? Like, it's in a sort of pocket dimension or something and most people don't know how to go there, or can't?”

“...and the 'exchanges' might be portals,” Zel-san mused. The new puzzle had completely distracted him from sulking over the fuss Mister Hess had made over his skin. “It would fit with something else I noticed. Did any of you actually read that dictionary Filia sold us, or did you just use it in the translation spell?”

At the various head-shakes, he said, “well, I did, and I have to tell you, there is no way that Talk is a human language originally. There is no conceivable reason for people to organize their thoughts like that.”

“Whaddaya mean?” Lina-san sounded a little bored.

“Well, for instance, there's no word for 'respect:” you have to say 'acknowlege superiority.' the word for friendship is literally, 'social-bond-by-choice.' And those are just the ones that almost make sense. The word for 'fire' parses out as 'very-quick-oxidation.' And when I looked up 'oxidation,' it said, 'rust, verdigris, or corrosion'. Fire is quick rust?”

“So it wasn't invented by humans. Golden and Aqua back home are mostly based on Dragon speech, right?”

“I guess... But even the dragons have words for friendship and fire – especially fire.”

“So what do we do now?” Gourry begged.

“Ask questions, of course.” Lina-san was brisk. “Let's go back to the picnic. I haven't had nearly enough to eat yet!”

Wehisho-san and Mister Hess were entirely happy to answer more questions about the City of Mind, and it did rather sound like it might be something with an Astral component to it. The City maintained the exchanges, and the exchanges were the only way to communicate with the City. People also, perhaps more often, used them for communicating with each other. (Which might explain a few _other_ things about the towns full of suspicious people they'd come across.) The City would answer any question you asked it, though understanding what it said was often a problem. Most communities asked the City to predict earthquakes and the weather. Some did research with the exchanges, a few people had them as part of the local temples and put them to more esoteric use.

“Like an oracle?” Amelia asked. 

Wehisho-san emitted a startled laugh. “I suppose it is like the visionaries at that! How funny.”

“Why funny?”

“The visionaries try to be a link between the Five Houses of the Earth and the Four Houses of the Sky. They are there to help us live inside our world, in wholeness. The City is outside the world and it sorts out everything into parts... the only poetry it has is what we give it. But it's the same problem, isn't it? Everything is there, and you can only ever bring some small piece of it across the gap of understanding...” She fell silent, pondering.

Amelia decided it was time to trust their informants a little further. She brought out the music box. “Have either of you ever seen anything like this?” She opened it out and it began to play its plangent little tune.

“That's very fine work.” Mister Hess announced. “Tune sounds a bit _chamhoy_ to me; don't you think so? Whoever made it must be rich; all that work on a toy.”

Wehisho-san nodded. “I wonder if they made the battery for the toy or if it was scavenged from somewhere? But even then... Maybe it's a sacred thing, somehow. A tune playing at a special place...”

“I'm sorry, the battery?” Amelia was nearly as excited as she was confused. Neither one was amazed that the box could play without being wound up, just curious about the gold decorations and things.

“The solar cell.” Mister Hess pointed at the green-black glass in the lid. “They take a lot of work to make, don't they?”

“I don't know, Mister Hess. We don't have those where we come from. We'd like to, though, if we could learn how to make them.”

Wehisho-san cocked her head at them. “Listen, you people really need to spend some time with the exchange, don't you? All those things you want to learn, and seeing if you can track down that thing you're looking for, and all the rest of it. It all sounds like scholar-work to me.”

“Yeah,” said Lina-san. “We hadn't realized before now that the exchanges had anything to do with scholarship. Back home, it's the temples that do that, and sometimes there's a secular library or two... and the places we've been to all had temples separate from the exchanges.” _Had_ being the operative word in quite a few cases, especially as they'd moved west and Lina's searching had grown more impatient.

“Not every town has a lot of scholars at the exchanges, actually. And the ones that do often don't let foreigners in – they can always get their own exchange at home for that kind of thing, after all. Let me see...” Wehisho pulled out a map of her own – a tiny one, no longer than her hand, etched into a piece of smooth stone or bone. The muleteer wore it hanging from a thong around her neck, and it didn't look nearly detailed enough to be useful. Maybe it served as a sort of memory aid, though, because she eventually looked up again and leaned over a larger map of the Omorn Peninsula that Zel-san had pulled out. “The Rekwit, who live about sixty miles north by sea or quite a bit more if you have to walk up and down the canyons, have both scholars and a liberal policy about using the exchange. Or, depending on which way the boats are going, it might also make sense to go to Sed, across the Inland Sea, here.”

“Wehisho-san, couldn't you go with us?” Amelia pleaded. “We're so confused and you seem to know so much...”

The young woman looked wistful, her dark face turned out toward the bay. Then she pulled herself together and nodded. “I can't promise I'll stay once you find someone to help you at the exchanges, but I can go with you as far as Rekwit or Sed; any route I take home will go by way of one of them or the other.”

“All right!” Lina-san, who had been leaning back, patting her stomach contentedly, sprang back to attention. She reached out and pumped Wehisho-san's hand again. “Now we're really getting somewhere! Welcome to the gang!”

Amelia didn't know why those words should sound like the end of a spell, like the moment when the weight of power snapped into a shape and started moving. They'd had other leads, other informants, along their way to Anitok; there was no reason to feel like finding Wehisho-san was going to be the chance that made all the difference. _I do feel like that, though._ They'd been traveling for months, but now, somehow, the adventure was truly beginning.

**Author's Note:**

> I spent the first half of _Slayers Try_ being irritated by how little they came up with to do with the divergent cultures of the Outer Lands. "Come on, people," I thought, "After a thousand years you should at least be able to find somewhere that the women wear trousers. Japan was only isolated for a few centuries and look what happened. You should know better." And then I got over it.
> 
> For the six or so of you that have read _Always Coming Home,_ I'm working off the map in the chapter titled "The Trouble with the Cotton People," and I'm putting Anitok somewhere around the Oak Hills River. For everyone else, the Omorn peninsula is bordered by the Omorn Sea to the east, and the Inland Sea to the west, and then there's another, smaller spit of land before you get to the Western ocean.


End file.
